Hugh Dafydd - Doom 01 - Knee Deep in the Dead.pdf - Hugh Dafydd - margozap

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Before the Beginning

Kefiristan is about as close as you can come to hell on Earth.

I say that with authority: I've spent the last eighteen months doing a tour here, trying to keep the Kefiri

People's Liberation Army, who call themselves the "Scythe of Glory," from the throats of the rightist

Khorastisti, who have the backing of Azeri transplants from the south (who want to keep their enclaves),

who are fighting a "dirty war" against Communist Cuban and Peruvian mercs . . . Jeez, you get the

picture. It's a snarled skein of a million bloody threads up here on the top of the world, in the northern

extension of the Karakoram range, between Afghanistan and Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

We'd just punched through the craggy pass pleasantly known as the "torn hymen" in the local tongue and

come across the small, Muslim city of pik Nizganij, perched on a mountain peak of 2200 meters.

I stared in horror. Even eighteen months of picking up after the Scythe of Glory and their Shining Path

buddies didn't prepare me for what was left of pik Nizganij.

It was a Bosch canvas, severed limbs and hollowed-out trunks—eaten out by animals, I

prayed—planted

through the fields like stalks of corn, blood painting doors and walls like the first Passover . . . except it was human

blood, not lamb's blood.

Corporal Flynn Taggart, Fox Company, 15th Light Drop Infantry Regiment, United States Marine Corps; 888-23-9912.

Everyone calls me Fly, except when they're pissed.

Fox crept through the town, hell-shocked, trying with-out much success to count body parts and make a reasonable

KIA guess. Fog or an evil cloud rolled across the mountaintop, shrouding the sprightly red decoration and muffling

our footsteps. It was like we walked along a cotton corridor, tripping over gruesome reminders that war, especially the

virulent hatred of one tribe for another, throws men back into pre-bronze, pre-agricul-tural savagery. I wondered how

many victims were killed by the victors' bare hands.

Something moved in the mist.

A shadow, a shape; nothing more. Gunnery Sergeant Goforth froze us with a slight hiss . . . Fox is damn-well trained,

even for the Light Drop.

Gates stopped next to me; he touched my arm, silently pointing to left and right. I saw immediately; whatever the

shapes were, they surrounded us from eight o'clock to four o'clock ... we might be able to retreat, but we couldn't flank.

I watched the gunny; Arlene Sanders was whispering something in his ear. She was our scout, the lightest of the Light

Drop. PFC Sanders could fade into the night so not even a werewolf could sniff her out. My best buddy.

She might have been more; once, we had—no; we were buddies. We didn't talk about that night. Anyway, she had

Dodd, and I don't separate bookends.

Arlene backed away, backed past me, throwing me a wink as she vanished. She would swing in a wide arc, ease around

behind the still-moving shades, and report back to the lieutenant and Gunny Goforth via a secured line. I'd find out

soon enough.

I hadn't moved, and neither had the rest of us; I could barely hear Bill breathing next to me and couldn't

hear Dodd or Sheill at all. If we were lucky, maybe the dinks wouldn't even know we were here; they'd

just pad right on by.

Then Lieutenant Beelzebub came running up, de-manding, "What the hell is going on?" in his normal

speaking voice, an irritating whine.

The lieutenant's name was Weems, actually. I just call him Beelzebub because he's a fat, sweaty heathen

always surrounded by a swarm of gnats. They like the taste of his perspiration.

The dinks froze as suddenly as we had; no longer moving, they vanished into the swirling gray. We had

just lost whatever surprise we had, lost our best chance to get out of this encounter without a shot fired ..

. and all because a buffoon who had been a first lieutenant for three years now couldn't figure out it was a

Medusa drill!

One of them moved; then another. They moved singly, here and there, and we no longer had a clue

where the mass of them was.

Weems began to panic; we'd all seen it before. "Aren't we going to take them out?" he asked Goforth,

who was frantically putting his finger to his lips. "Somebody should take them out."

Goforth put his hand to his ear; he was listening to Arlene's report, trying to stifle the lieutenant with his

other hand.

But Weems saw a ghost to his left, a specter to his right. We were surrounded! In Weems's mind—I use

the term loosely—they were Indians, we were the 7th Cav, and he was Custer.

"The lieutenant isn't going to stand for this!" snapped the lieutenant. "Goforth, take out those soldiers!"

The gunny broke his own drill. "Sir, we don't even know who they are . . . Sanders says they're wearing

robes and hoods—"

"Scythe of Glory!" said Weems, again raising his voice.

"No sir, just robed men—"

"Gunny, I gave you an order . . . now take down those men!"

Arlene flashed past me again. "What the hell's going on?" she hissed.

"Weems wants us to take 'em down."

"Fly, they're monks! You gotta stop the crazy son of a bitch!"

I was the second-ranking noncom; Goforth would listen to me, I thought. I hunched over and jogged to

the gunnery sergeant. "Gunny, Arlene says they're monks."

"Taggart, right?" said Weems, as if bumping into me at an oyster-shucking party.

"Sir, they're just monks."

"Do you know that for sure? Does anyone know that for sure?"

"Sanders said—"

"Sanders said! Sanders said! Does Sanders have to deal with Colonel Brinkle every week?"

"Sir," began the gunny, "I think we should recon the group before we open fire."

Weems looked him in the face, shaking in fury. "As long as I'm giving the orders here, Marine, you'll obey

them. Now take down those men!"

Monks. Freakin' monks!

I snapped. Maybe it was the bodies, or the body parts. The mountain air, thin oxygen. A gutful of

Weems, Arlene's frightened, incredulous stare, the way Goforth's jaw set and he turned to give the

order—a twenty-year man, he wasn't going to throw it away over a bunch of lousy religious dinks.

But suddenly, it occurred to me that if Weems were lying facedown in the deep muddy, he wouldn't be

giving no orders. Then we could let the damned monks disap-pear, and nobody would be the loser.

"Scuse me, sir," I said, tapping the looie on the shoulder.

He turned, and I Georged him. Full-body swing; came out of Orlando, where I grew up. Picked up speed over Parris

Island, hooked in at Kefiristan, and turned off the lights of Mr. Lieutenant Weems in pik Nizganij.

Alas, they only flickered. Power was restored. The dork didn't have a glass jaw; have to give him that.

Weems sprawled messily in the mud, and a couple of the boys were on me like monkeys on a tree. Weems flopped for

a bit like a giant spider, then he found his hands and knees. He glared at me for a moment, an evil smile cracking his

face. "Later," he said. Then he turned back to Goforth. "That don't mean crap, gunnery ser-geant; now take down

those men—or are you going to frag me, instead?"

Goforth looked at me, looked at Weems, looked at the ground. Then he clicked his M-92 to rock 'n' roll and quietly said,

"Fox—take down those men."

I closed my eyes, listening to powder hiss, bullets crack, the metal clang of receivers slamming back and home. The

screams of the dying. The shouts of the victors. I smelled the smoke from the smokeless power, the primer, fresh

blood.

I'm in hell, I remember thinking; I'm in hell.

We mopped up the enemy troops in record time. Strange thing; none of them shot back. Fact, no weapons were found

. . . just fifty-three men ranging from pre-teen to seventy or eighty, wearing brown robes and hoods, shaved heads, a

couple carrying prayer sticks.

The boys wouldn't get off my back. Weems wouldn't even walk around where I could see him, the murdering bastard,

while he formally charged me and I opted for a formal court-martial instead of Captain's Mast.

Jesus and Mary, somebody should put a bullet in his brain. I could taste the trigger. I didn't know how I was ever

going to be shriven if I couldn't feel remorse.

1 I didn't miss Earth, but I sure as hell hated Mars. Sitting in a dingy mess hall on Phobos, one of the two,

tiny Martian moons, seemed like a nice compro-mise.

Ordinarily, the C.O., Major Boyd, would have handed me over to the jaggies for trial; but the day after

Weems gave the fateful order that bought him a mouthful of fist from Yours Truly, the 15th received

orders to answer a distress call from Phobos. Fox Company was due to rotate back to the world

anyway; Boyd decided to mail us to Mars.

They poured me onto the transport along with the rest of Fox; plenty of time to fry my butt after we

figured out what the hell the UAC miners were squawking about this time.

The Corps, the Corps, all glory to the Corps! I don't think you know what the Marine Corps truly means

to me. It has a bit to do with my father; no, he was not a Marine, God no. Maybe something to do with

growing up in Orlando, Florida, and Los Angeles, seeing first the ersatz "Hollywood Boulevard" of

Universal Studios East, then the even phonier real thing out west. Glitter and tinsel. . . but what was real?

Everything in my life rang as hollow as the boulevard until I found my core in the Corps.

Honor wasn't just something you did to credit cards. A lie wasn't called spin control, and spin was

something you only put on a cue ball. Yeah, right, you think you know more about it than I? I know it

was all BS, even in the Corps. I know the service was riddled up and down with lying sacks of dung, like

everything else. "There is no cause so noble it will not attract fuggheads;" one of those sci-fi writers

Arlene is always shoving at me, David Niven or something.

But God damn it, at least we say the word honor without laughing. At least we have a code—"I will not

lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those among us who do"—even if individuals don't always live up to it. At

least it's there to reach for, even if our grasp falls far short. At least decency has a legal definition, right

there in the Universal Code of Military Justice! At least respect means more than leaving the other guy's

graffiti alone. At least we do more crap by sixA.M. than most of you civilians do all day. At least the

Corps is the Corps, semper fidelis—damn it, we know who we are and why we are! Do you?

Arlene never saw it the way I did; hell, no one did. I was a majority of one.

But you can't understand me unless you understand this much: there is a place in the world where decent

men walk the streets, where water flows uphill, where miracles happen behind enemy lines and without

air support, and where a guy (boy or girl) will stand on the wall that divides you people from the

barbarians at the gate, take a bullet, and shoot back at the son of a bitch what fired it.

Unless you've been there, you'll never know. I want to take you there.

The long trip to Mars was dull, and the little voice in the back of my head had plenty of time to ask

whether I would do anything different if given the chance. I had to honestly answer no.

Funny thing is, I always hoped I'd go to space one day . . . but not like this. My idea was to be on a

deep-space exploratory ship, pushing out beyond the bounds of the known solar system. But when I

scored only a 60 on the MilSpaceAp test, the chances of me receiving a deep-space assignment ranged

somewhere between infinitesimal and "forget it." The big surprise was that one right upper cut to the

concrete jaw of Lieutenant Weems opened my pathway to the stars.

Not only would I do it over again, I'd still enjoy it!

I stared at the two men whose job was to guard me, and had a strange feeling of unreality. "Want some

coffee?" one of them asked with something that sounded like actual concern. His thin face reminded me

of one of the monks.

"Yeah," I said. "Black, if you don't mind." He smiled. We'd run out of cream back in Kefiristan, and

when he hopped up to Phobos, the supply situation was no improvement.

The guard's name was Ron. The other guard's name was Ron, too—I called him "Ron Two," but they

didn't see the humor in it.

We didn't talk much. It seemed a little insulting only having two Marines protecting such a dangerous type

as Yours Truly; but the other men were busy figuring out what had gone wrong on Phobos.

After we up-shipped to Mars Base, we sat for a solid day, trying to find out why the UAC miners on

Phobos had sent a distress call—and why they didn't answer now. In the Marines, you spend eternity so

bored you'd look forward to your own court-martial as a break in the tedium. Then an unexpected

danger with huge, jagged edges comes rolling over all the set routines, a reminder that the universe is a

dangerous place.

The last message we received from Phobos was: "Things coming through the Gate." When something that

serious hits the fan, boredom is returned to its proper place as a luxury. The court-martial of a corporal

was deemed less important than a potential threat to Mars—and not important at all compared to an

imme-diate threat to the profits of the Union Aerospace Corpo-ration.

Hugh Dafydd - Doom 01 - Knee Deep in the Dead.pdf

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